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Own Your Retirement

That all Men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Right…; among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety. —Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Indispensable to personal freedom is the liberty for each person to choose how to allocate and invest their time, labor and money as well as to own the gains made by these investments.

Own Your Retirement

Recently, public workers have become more aware their pensions and healthcare programs are in very serious jeopardy. Elected city, county and state officials have made contracts with their employees, but are unable to fund their promises. Sadly, this is the great flaw of democracies. Politicians buy votes to get elected - for example promising great retirements to government union workers - but do not tax, invest or provide adequate resources to pay for their promises. [Read: Detroit & Stockton Bankruptcies Expose Democracy's Great Flaw - Short-term Politics Trumps Long-term Planning]

Unforeseen at the time of their elections, government workers in Detroit, Stockton, Chicago and many other cities are learning they have been duped by long-gone politicians. Clearly, this is immoral governance.

Then, compare the plight of government workers in Detroit, Chicago and Stockton to those employees in three counties in Texas, who opted out of Social Security by creating personal retirement accounts. [Read: Three Texas Counties Opted Out of Social Security]. In 30 years, the county workers in these three counties will retire with more money and better death and disability supplemental benefits than the public employees of Stockton, Detroit and Chicago.

Most importantly, the government workers of Galveston, Matagorda and Brazoria Counties own their retirement, and immoral, corrupt governance will not reduce or take away their nest eggs. These Texas counties chose private accounts and used professional money managers competing for the opportunity to invest their money. As a result, the employees are guaranteed a minimum rate of return.

Merrill Mathews in the Wall Street journal cites the better returns provided by professional money managers:

Those who retire under the Texas counties' Alternate Plan do much better than those on Social Security. According to First Financial's calculations, based on 40 years of contributions:

• A lower-middle income worker making about $26,000 at retirement would get about $1,007 a month under Social Security, but $1,826 under the Alternate Plan.

• A middle-income worker making $51,200 would get about $1,540 monthly from Social Security, but $3,600 from the banking model.

• And a high-income worker who maxed out on his Social Security contribution every year would receive about $2,500 a month from Social Security versus $5,000 to $6,000 a month from the Alternate Plan.

As Galveston County Judge Mark Henry says, "The plan works great. Anyone who spends a few minutes understanding the plan becomes a huge proponent." Judge Henry says that out of 1,350 county employees, only five have chosen not to participate.

A saving and investing system has enormous benefits to all Americans, and ownership stops immoral and corrupt governance because investors protect and preserve their property as well as that of their fellow workers. In the three Texas counties, employees are receiving more money in retirement, which is obviously good. However, what's most important to every American is saving and investing – as opposed to taxing and redistributing by government – provides seed money which propels commerce and industry.

Personal accounts for retirement is absolutely essential for personal freedom and a vibrant society. America’s critical task is to end our corrupt political system and create personal accounts.

The benefit of America’s federalist system, in which the states are largely free to set their own laws and regulations, is that these “laboratories of democracy” allow us to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of economic success. While there are numerous pitfalls in examining economic statistics, due to the wide variety of variables involved, you can learn a lot by seeing where people choose to live. People generally flock to locations where they can get a good job, raise their children as they please, and afford a decent standard of living, all things that directly relate to economic freedom.

Much of the efforts to reform the justice system have been concentrated on front-end sentencing and back-end reentry reform. When it comes to sentencing reform, the idea is that a punishment should fit the crime. Rather than lengthy sentences mandated by big government politicians that ostensibly warehouse low-level, nonviolent offenders, judges should have the option to more appropriate sentences, including diversion programs. For offenders already in the prison system, rehabilitative programming -- such as work training and education -- would provide them with the means to learn skills so they can live productive, honest lives after they return to society.

Justice reform has become a hot topic on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress from both parties are pushing for substantive reforms that would bring rehabilitative programs to the federal corrections system, modify out-of-date sentencing laws, make communities safer, and reduce burdens on taxpayers. But reform would not be possible if conservative states had not previously paved the road.

Today marks the 50th Anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid, which were signed into law on July 30, 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. These programs, along with Social Security, are collectively referred to as entitlement programs and are taking up a growing proportion of the annual budget. This problem is overshadowed by an even larger danger for Medicare and Social Security: their trust funds are about to dry up.

Over the past several weeks, President Barack Obama has increasingly spoke of the need to reform the United States' justice system. In mid-July, for example, he spoke at the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia and called for reform of costly and unjust mandatory minimum sentences and, later, appeared at a federal prison in Oklahoma to further emphasize the need to overhaul the justice system to lower repeat offender rates.

It is easy to look at the decline in violent crime rates and believe that lengthy prison sentences mandated by Congress were the catalyst. Unfortunately, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley recently made this utterly misleading argument. But as the Brennan Center for Justice explained in a February 2015 study, crime rates fell because of "various social, economic, and environmental factors, such as growth in income and an aging population." Lengthy sentences that contributed to the sharp rise of prison populations had very little to do with it.

Last week, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) gave his support to the SAFE Justice Act, a comprehensive bill that would make a number of significant and substantive changes to federal sentencing and prison policies that have contributed the boom in federal corrections spending. Boehner's support is the most recent and, perhaps, most notable example of the growing consensus on Capitol Hill for justice reform.

A number of congressional Democrats have signed a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to consider expansion of Social Security, the 80-year-old program designed to provide retirement benefits to Americans. The letter was sent on Monday for the White House Conference on Aging, a once-in-a-decade meeting where at attendees analyze and discuss various policy proposals for seniors and make recommendations.

"By being more intelligent about who you send to prison, being more selective in that, and putting resources into drug treatment, mental health treatment, and things that keep people out of prison, you can lower your costs and make the streets safer," Pat Nolan, Director of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, told FreedomWorks of the groundbreaking justice reforms implemented in Texas in a recent video. The reforms, dubbed the "Texas model," have become a blueprint for other, mostly Republican, states to cut prison costs and reprioritize spending or reduce the burden of taxpayers.

This week, the Congressional Budget Office came out with its Long-Term Budget Outlook for 2015. The report foreshadows growing deficits, mounting debt, and economic harm if the status quo is allowed to continue.